‘In Other Words’ review: Jhumpa Lahiri’s love letter to Italian

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Feb 02, 2016943

By Howard Norman

Jhumpa Lahiri lived with her family in Rome in 2012. Though she had studied Italian for 20 years, as part of her "full immersion" into the Italian language, she now kept a kind of philological notebook, full of vocabulary, phrases, rules of grammar. Initially, some of this was shaped into an essay in the magazine Internazionale.

And now we have the memoir, "In Other Words," which Lahiri, one of the most intellectually elegant novelists in the world, composed in Italian. The English translation by Ann Goldstein (translator of "The Complete Works of Primo Levi" and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet) participates in an exquisite duet across the page with Lahiri's Italian.